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Donald Trump takes a fatal shit on ‘Too Dumb For Suicide: Tim Heidecker’s Trump Songs’
11.16.2017
09:02 am
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A year to the day in the making, Tim Heidecker’s Donald Trump protest numbers have been collected together as a new album Too Dumb For Suicide: Tim Heidecker’s Trump Songs.

While some people find themselves sapped of the will to live by Donald Trump, Heidecker clearly finds him creatively inspiring, albeit in a bitter/rancorous sense. Steadily rolled out since that dark day the most horrible human being of all time managed to squeak into the White House and get handed the nuclear football, Heidecker says “Most of these songs were written and recorded quickly, with the blood still boiling from whatever indignity or absurdity had popped up on my newsfeed that day.”

Too Dumb For Suicide features a credible Elvis Costello pastiche about POTUS squeezing out a toxic and painful black KFC turd and ultimately dying whilst taking a shit on his gilded toilet; an inspiring number about beating neo-Nazi goofball Richard Spencer about the face and neck; an explication in jaunty song about what exactly it will take to make America great again and a beautifully-backhanded Randy Newman-esque “tribute” to Trump’s weasel-like Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross. There’s even a cover version “bonus track” of Heidecker’s “Trump’s Private Pilot” by Josh Tillman doing his very best Father John Misty impression as a pilot ready to sacrifice himself for the good of the human race and asking everyone to support a Kickstarter for his kids.

Too Dumb For Suicide is all this and more, although noted weenie Paul Simon refused to allow “I Am A Cuck” (an alt-right take-off on his “I Am A Rock”) to be included. I asked Heidecker a few questions via email.

Dangerous Minds: Is it safe to assume that you don’t really like Donald Trump all that much?

Tim Heidecker: What’s to like? He’s everything we’re taught not to be.  But he’s also totally absurd and very funny to me. So I reflect those two sides; some funny stuff, but also some very dark stuff.

Tell me how you really feel…

Tim Heidecker: It’s all broken and pointless and folks should start thinking about living in the woods again.

Continues after the jump…

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Posted by Richard Metzger
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11.16.2017
09:02 am
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Tim Heidecker is back as ‘Decker,’ a true American hero who hates terrorism
03.09.2015
01:49 pm
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AdultSwim.com’s adventure series Decker, starring Tim Heidecker as Agent Jack Decker a “true American hero” who is “capable of getting the job done,” returns today for a new season with new three-minute webisodes dropping daily for “the foreseeable future” as the press release put it.

Decker battles terrorism and the worst president we’ve ever had so Americans can haz freedom, saving Hawaii from the Taliban with the help of his trusty sidekick, CIA code-breaker Kington (Heidecker’s co-host of On Cinema At The Cinema, Gregg Turkington AKA Neil Hamburger).

Dangerous Minds: How would you describe Decker?

Tim Heidecker: Decker is a web series which follows lone wolf CIA agent Jack Decker as he fights terrorism and battles with the bureaucracy of Washington… the character is my character from On Cinema’s version of the ultimate action star. It’s his attempt at doing, Steven Seagal, Clint Eastwood, Jack Nicholson, Robert DeNiro all at once, but it comes out closer to Donald Trump. The editing is either done by him or someone with very little experience in the entertainment arts.

It’s important to take note that Decker is a spin off of a web series based on a podcast. wink

So the Decker character is pretty closely based on the real you?

Not really in any way, except that if I really did try to make an action show I would fail as well.

What are the advantages of the three-minute drama over say, a five-minute episodic?

Well we are trying to capture the short attention spans of this terrible generation, I guess!  One of the macro jokes we play with is the lack of story movement and the fun we have with padding things—stretching story and jokes until they feel like they may break. Cutting these up into a a TON of episodes helps.  We’re going to release one a day, five days a week for… a while.

You and Eric are incredibly prolific. You just had the Bedtime Stories series, there’s your cooking show, and now hot on the heels of your recent three-hour Oscar telecast, there’s a brand new series of Decker. Only David Lynch seems to be able to churn out material at the rate you guys can. He launched his own line of David Lynch signature coffee beans, so I’m wondering if we can expect a Tim and Eric edible product line in the future?

We flirted with opening a small restaurant called “Hamburgers and Hot Dogs” for a while in LA, but everyone we knew said we were crazy to get into the food business. The odds are just so high that you’ll fail! There’s a really, really perfect product out there that we might try to dip into soon—more on that later.

I’m happy to hear that you have that perception. I often feel unproductive but when you list it out it sounds mighty nice!

New episodes of Decker will premiere every day, Monday to Friday, from now to whenever on AdultSwim.com.

Below, the Decker “sizzle” reel:

Posted by Richard Metzger
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03.09.2015
01:49 pm
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Are Tim and Eric running the Totino’s pizza Tumblr?


 
Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim are the two geniuses behind Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! and their latest venture Tim & Eric’s Bedtime Stories, both of which have emerged from Adult Swim. It’s safe to say that Tim & Eric have developed one of the most distinctive voices in comedy today, rather as if the Wonder Showzen gang had gotten trapped inside a KMart clothing warehouse with full access to the best video effects the 1980s had to offer.

Their purposefully garish sense of awkwardness is so powerful that it’s spawned a delirious subreddit, r/NotTimAndEric, that’s dedicated to real-life examples of the actual world seeming to imitate Tim & Eric bits. That subreddit has 38,022 readers as of this writing, so it’s not like there is any shortage of that kind of thing. Point being: Tim & Eric are potent.

Tim & Eric made the news last week when their commercial for Totino’s Pizza Rolls (and assorted other Totino’s pizza products) hit the Internet, producing an expectedly awestruck reaction (that commercial is linked below). The clip, called “Pizza Freaks Unite,” is staggering enough, but what you might not know is that, in keeping with their new branding, Totino’s has a full-blown Tumblr in the Tim & Eric style. In the headline I asked if Tim & Eric are actually running the Tumblr, but there’s a journalistic truism that the answer to any question trumpeted by a media outlet is always “No,” because if the fact at issue could be proven, then that would be the headline—i.e. questions are for unproven speculation.

So I don’t necessarily think that Tim & Eric are running the Totino’s Tumblr. However, it is very enjoyable in a similar way to Tim & Eric’s TV work. Even if it’s not true, the Tumblr as well as the Totino’s PR strategy in general seem to indicate that this is a major mainstreaming moment for Tim & Eric’s aesthetic. Tim & Eric’s stuff may be brilliant, but it isn’t exactly The Big Bang Theory—indeed, it could fairly be said that their work might give some (older) portion of the audience a frontal-lobe headache. So it’s a pretty significant moment to see their worldview cross over. It isn’t every day that Andy Kaufman shows up for his first day of work at Taxi, after all. 
 

 

 

 
More Tim and Eric-flavored pizza stuff after the jump…

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Posted by Martin Schneider
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11.13.2014
10:57 am
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Tim Heidecker channels his inner rock star in Dangerous Minds Q&A
12.09.2013
03:28 pm
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As longtime DM readers are by now probably pretty well-aware, I’m a huge Tim and Eric fan. I’ve seen ‘em live, I bought all the DVDs (even the early material sold on their website) and apparently I’m one of the few people who thought Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie was piss-yourself funny (Everyone knows that you can’t trust the tastes of the general public, even if Netflix stars do tend to mostly be correct, but I digress…)

When the publicist for Some Things Never Stay The Same, the sophomore effort from Tim Heidecker and Davin Wood, contacted me about the album, I said “Yes, please” and then I thought “Hey, wait a minute, Tim Heidecker has a serious band??” Like most of you, for me, the idea of a comic doing music brings to mind not necessarily the great “Weird Al” Yankovic, or even Steve Martin, but Eddie Murphy’s hack 80s shit like “My Girl Wants to Party All the Time.”

My fears were completely unfounded. Some Things Never Stay The Same is a really, really good album. It completely won me over. The songs are as catchy as anything heard on 70s AM radio. Hear them one time and you’ll be humming them to yourself soon afterwards. With the assistance of guests like Aimee Mann, Eric Johnson (The Shins, Fruit Bats) and others, Heidecker & Wood have, um, “seriously” managed to put together one of the most fun albums of 2013. I said “fun” not “funny.” There’s a difference, but I’ll let Tim explain exactly what they’re up to.

Richard Metzger: In the press materials, it says that you and Davin Wood wanted to record an homage to 70s singer/songwriters like Warren Zevon and Harry Nilsson. “Cocaine,” the lead-off track refers to just the sort of creative fuel rock stars liked to ingest back then. Did you guys snort up a massive amount of blow before you wrote that song? I ask because I can’t imagine that you were inspired to write that by eating a lot of pancakes, because otherwise you’d have just written a paean to flapjacks. Am I off base here?

Tim Heidecker: You are off base. Really off base. It’s disappointing that this is your first question. a dreaded JOKE question. I really admire this blog and visit it daily, so it was really dispiriting to to find the first question so corny and LOUSY! My gosh what a way to get things started….. Boy.

Anyway, I’ve never done cocaine in my life - for real. Never had the interest and frankly the anti-cocaine propaganda surrounding me in the ‘80s really frightened me into staying away from it. the song idea popped into my head as songs normally do—out of thin air—the words and melody fitting together nicely… me playing around with the chords from “Werewolves of London” playing them backwards… Then I thought it’d be funny to write a really positive song about cocaine—no down side—almost from the perspective of someone in their honeymoon period with the drug before the dark side of it shows up.  Even the bridge, which is usually a good place to go “but there’s another side to this story,” keeps things positive.

RM: Hey, calm down, that was a totally legit question. I think you’re just being overly sensitive about being a comic making “serious” music, Tim. Just go with it. You’re among friends here. I’d imagine that a lot of our readers probably, you know, love cocaine.

But speaking of serious music, how did you rope in Aimee Mann for the project? I respect her so much as a musician that I actually buy her CDs, I don’t even download ‘em. Really.

Tim Heidecker: Fine! I’m COOL! Let’s try and steer this thing back on track… Aimee and I go way back. Not really. Is six years way back? I became friends with her through my wife, which was nice. She didn’t start out as a “SHOW BIZ FRIEND”—just a nice person that my wife would go feed squirrels with. She didn’t know my work, and frankly I think a lot of it grosses her out!  I don’t blame her! But we’re good buds and we’re always looking for stuff to do together. I had the idea for her to sing on a few songs and called her up—she was over in my garage that afternoon and there you go.

RM: I remember when she was on Awesome Show! Is Aimee Mann herself a “serious” musician who wants to be funny?

Tim Heidecker: I find a lot of musicians gravitate towards comedy and vice versa—I think it has more to do with the stuff in our brains that made us get into “show business” than how we neatly fit into our categories we’ve lined up into. I’ve been thinking about this a lot actually as I understand it can be confusing or “bad business” to jump in and out of comedy/music/drama/ballet or whatever it may be, but I bet a lot of people didn’t start out knowing exactly where they’d fit and just went with the first thing that really clicked and paid the bills. Hence, Russell Crowe’s band and all the rest.

RM: Davin Wood and you did most of the music for Awesome Show! together, right?

Tim Heidecker: Yes sir that’s right. Eric of course also throws in his ideas and little jingle ideas as well—I made a lot of the music for “Casey and His Brother” and David Liebe Hart’s songs—a lot of the low fi/super crappy stuff as I taught myself home recording… One I’m proud of is a little song called “Live with my Dad”—the MIDI horns are just… yuck.

All the GOOD sounding stuff came from either us singing Davin a little melody or sending him a little demo and giving him a genre to work in or giving him the idea and letting him build the song—revisions and notes, etc… It’s weird—he lives in Echo Park but we’re on different schedules so almost all our work on the show was done over email and phone calls.

RM: It’s quite a leap from the Casiotone, vocoder and keytar sound of the Tim and Eric soundtrack to the “analog” Laurel Canyon sound on the album. You do a great Bob Dylan, a pretty good Warren Zevon, there’s that ditty boosting Scientology in the style of The Kinks that you did and there’s the music from the show which is all over the place… You’re like the Rich Little of alt comedy and it seems like you could probably mimic practically any musical style you wanted to, so at what point did you and Davin think, “Hey, let’s do this...” and commit to the Canyon sound?

Tim Heidecker: No one wants to be the Rich Little of ANYTHING, but thank you nonetheless.  I think we want the songs to work together as albums and it’s stronger to keep the style somewhat consistent.  That said, I think we kind of branched out into a few different styles on this record: “Sunday Man” and “On Your Own” are kind of Pink Floyd-style space rockers.
 

 
RM: I really like “Getaway Man.” The lyrics to that one are straight up Randy Newman, who I love. It’s wonderfully silly, but well-played, and so affectionate, I must say. You do Randy Newman as well as he does. What inspired that story? A bank robbery? A clingy girlfriend? Both?

Tim Heidecker: Oh man, I don’t remember. Maybe having just seen Drive? I adore Randy Newman and got a bit obsessed a few years ago. If you’re reading this and saying “Whaaaa?” I suggest you go back and check out Sail Away and Good Old Boys two records that I could listen to every day of the week. Anyways, I think the song gets a little silly in the second verse and was pretty happy with the line “Evening Sun,” which sounds like something but really isn’t! I like when that happens—fun word play that sounds right in the song but upon further investigation is nonsense. The song gets a lot of Springsteen comparisons, too, and thats because we did the trick of playing a high piano note coupled with the glockenspiel. It’s a recipe for insta-Boss.

RM: I like the soulful horns on that one, too. Production value! Sounds expensive.

Tim Heidecker: Yea! We brought in real live human beings to play on this record!  Davin really is the master of dialing in the MIDI to sound really great but we had new some players who were game so we had them over to my garage and built those parts.

RM: Okay, last question: What’s the next musical genre you two will take on with the next Heidecker & Wood project?

Tim Heidecker: Who knows? I have piles of songs in various stages of completion. Some country flavored (but I think Ween already cornered that idea). Probably more of the same. Hopefully we get better. I think a priority would be to do the next record a little more “live in the studio” with some really good players - I was listening to the reissue of Moondance and it was striking to hear that although the songs are all different there’s a consistent arrangement to each of them—it’s really just some guys in a room playing these songs. I think that’d be fun to do.

Some Things Never Stay The Same is out now via Little Record Company. Below, a high-spirited performance of “Cocaine” at Largo in Los Angeles on April 27, 2011.
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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12.09.2013
03:28 pm
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Tim Heidecker’s musical tribute to Scientology
08.08.2013
01:49 pm
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Have a listen to Tim Heidecker’s amusing new ditty about everybody’s favorite religion that uses lie detectors for spiritual growth!

Written and recorded while listening to a lot of “Arthur” era Kinks… went for the simple, working class narrator delivery… end the end, didn’t come out sounding much like a Kinks song, but they were an influence. Please enjoy and TGIF thanks.

 

 
This does have that patented Ray Davies “singalong with me now, people” quality going for it, but I’m even more partial to Heidecker’s boozy, bluesy southern rock pastiche, “Hot Piss.” Just now my wife came into my office and asked “What are you laughing so hard about?” Yup, it was this:
 

 
And when he’s not composing songs about about being caught in the act of drinking his own urine, did you know that this multi-media Renaissance man has his own cooking show, too?
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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08.08.2013
01:49 pm
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Bob Dylan’s Super Bowl half time show, details leaked
01.30.2013
06:59 pm
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I don’t want to spoil any of the fun here, so I’ll just say “Tim Heidecker writes”:

Here it is. My 4th Annual Super Bowl Half Time Show song leak. This one is from none other than Bob Dylan, who is replacing Beyonce who dropped out after her inauguration lip synching scandal.

“Running Out The Clock” is a previously unreleased song from Dylan’s 1983 “Infidels” album. I guess it makes sense… the football metaphors and references.

I hope you enjoy and know I’ll be back next year with another leak.

 

 
If you’re going to fake a Dylan song, to model yours after an Infidels outtake is so ridiculous and obtuse that I just can’t stop laughing about it.

And speaking of Tim Heidecker, have you seen the Tim and Eric film, Tim & Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie? I watched it recently and it’s fucking hilarious. I’d even go so far to say it’s the Penn & Teller Get Killed of our time (and I mean that in a good way, I LOVED Penn & Teller Get Killed, honest I did!). It’s on Netflix, so get stoned and watch it pronto. Forget about those snooty Sundance audiences and the haters on Rotten Tomatoes, what do they know?

Heidecker also has a movie review podcast called “On Cinema, At The Cinema” where he muses about new films with friends. In a recent episode, with guest host Gregg Turkington (you may know him as Neil Hamburger), the two discussed Zero Dark Thirty, a “documentary” about the death of “one of the original bad guys in cinema and in… the world,” Osama bin Laden. Genius funny stuff.
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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01.30.2013
06:59 pm
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Tim Heidecker in “You Have My Eyes Now”
09.14.2009
05:27 pm
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New video for Clues starring Tim and Marilyn Heidecker. Directed by Matt Wells.

Posted by Richard Metzger
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09.14.2009
05:27 pm
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